Bill Ted Cruz for the $24 billion government shutdown's cost

Wednesday

Oct 23, 2013 at 6:00 AMOct 23, 2013 at 7:50 AM

By Peter S. Cohan, WALL & MAIN

Hurray! The Red Sox are in the World Series again — washing away all but a vague memory of October's 16 day government shutdown. I would be happy to forget about that unpleasantness, except for the $24 billion it cost the American economy and the utterly toxic political system from which it sprang that is sure to rear its ugly head at the beginning of 2014 when the current short-term deal expires.

But I have a modest proposal to make Washington act more like a role model of democracy: Require the person who led the shutdown — Calgary, Alberta-native, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) — to pay for the economic damage that his "leadership" helped cause.

How much damage did the shutdown cause? Standard & Poor's Ratings Services said on October 16 that the shutdown reduced fourth-quarter 2013 gross domestic product growth by at least 0.6 percent — taking $24 billion out of the economy.

Should Mr. Cruz write a $24 billion check to the U.S. Treasury to cover the damage that he caused to the U.S. economy? He is under no legal obligation to do so. Nor is he the only person responsible for the shutdown.

But he would be a good person to receive the $24 billion invoice and he could go hat in hand to collect from his fellow travelers. After all, he was the person who filibustered the Senate for 21 hours on September 24 in an effort to defund the Affordable Care Act in exchange for opening up the federal government. That effort was funded by $200 million from Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries, according to the New York Times.

And House Speaker, John Boehner (R-Ohio), invoked the Hastert Rule — which calls for a leader not to send legislation to the House floor for a vote unless it has the support of the majority of the majority — to keep the House from voting on a bill that would have kept the government from shutting down. Rolling Stone reported that 174 Tea Party Republicans — members of the Republican Study Committee — opposed it.

Why should Cruz pay? To understand my reasoning, let me discuss two ideas from the University of Chicago — incentives matter, and free markets rule; and one from the Supreme Court, that money is First-Amendment-protected speech.

University of Chicago economist Gary Becker earned a 1992 Nobel Prize for his ideas about how people respond to incentives. For example, he argued that most criminals are not deranged lunatics, but rational people. According to the Chicago Tribune, he argued that "criminals weigh the reward of a crime against the likelihood of getting caught and the severity of the punishment. Becker came to study this subject after he decided one day to illegally park in a convenient spot." Change the incentives, and you change the behavior.

Another University of Chicago idea — that "free markets" unfettered by government intervention yield better allocation of resources — was propounded by Mr. Becker's mentor, 1976 Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman. This philosophy underpinned the deregulation of the financial services industry, effectively repealing the Glass-Steagall Act passed in the wake of The Great Depression, that led to the financial crisis of 2008 that cost the U.S. $23.7 trillion in cash and guarantees according to Bloomberg.

Finally, there is the 2010 Supreme Court decision Federal Election Commission vs. Citizens United which equated money with speech — enabling companies to spend an unlimited amount of money on politicians and political advocacy as protected by the First Amendment of the Constitution.

What do these three ideas have to do with Mr. Cruz? The idea of free markets is quite important here ,especially as it pertains to the so-called Tea Party of which Mr. Cruz is a vocal member. The Tea Party was formed in the wake of people being upset that the government was bailing out Wall Street during the 2008 financial crisis — kicked off by CNBC's Rick Santelli's February 2009 rant about taxpayers "bailing out the mortgages of deadbeats."

In order to be logically consistent with Mr. Santelli's view that taxpayers should not pay for the financial mistakes of the people who caused them, Tea Partier Cruz should be the one to bear the costs of the government shutdown that he caused. More specifically, using Tea Party logic, why should taxpayers pay the salaries of government workers who were furloughed for 16 days thanks to Mr. Cruz? Let Mr. Cruz pay.

This brings me to the importance of financial incentives. Mr. Santelli's outrage that sparked the Tea Party conflagration was sparked by a violation of a basic free market idea: People who take a risk should receive the rewards, if any, that flow from it — and they should bear the cost of a bet gone bad — rather than shifting that loss onto someone else.

But Mr. Cruz is not bearing the $24 billion loss to the economy that he kicked off. In fact, he enjoyed a $1.2 million increase in contributions after his filibuster, according to The Atlantic Wire. Mr. Cruz's decision to filibuster was a rational response to incentives. So it stands to reason that if the incentives were changed, he might hesitate to pursue such a strategy in the future. If instead of gaining $1.2 million in campaign contributions, he were forced to pay the full cost of the government shutdown, he might think twice before doing it again.

Finally, there is the matter of equating money with speech. This brings to mind the idea that the First Amendment does not protect all forms of speech. For example, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in a 1917 decision, one that blocked the distribution of flyers opposing the World War I draft, claiming that they constituted a clear and present danger to the U.S. under the Espionage Act — that "the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic."

But surely the government shutdown and the failure to raise the government's debt ceiling until the last moment came perilously close to causing financial panic. Perhaps the limits to freedom of speech about which Mr. Holmes wrote should apply to the way Koch Industries spent $200 million to induce Mr. Cruz's nearly panic-inducing utterances.

To stop that from happening in the future, all we have to do is apply the free market principles that got Mr. Cruz's Tea Party started in the first place. Make Mr. Cruz pay back the $24 billion he helped cost America!

Peter Cohan of Marlboro heads a management consulting and venture capital firm, and teaches business strategy and entrepreneurship at Babson College. His email address is peter@petercohan.com.

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